Category: Quote For The Day

"There is no place in our campaign, or any campaign, for this kind of politics. A volunteer county coordinator made the mistake of forwarding an outrageous and offensive chain e-mail. This was wholly unauthorized and we were totally unaware of it. Let me be clear: No one should be engaging in this. We are asking this volunteer county coordinator to step down and are making it clear to every person involved in our campaign that this will not be tolerated," – Clinton web guru Peter Daou, responding to the news that a Clinton campaign chair in Iowa had been sending along an Obama-Is-A-Muslim email.

"Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud’s. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," he claims, "everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations," – Terry Eagleton on William Blake. (Illustration: Newton by Blake.)

"I think someone has complained about the noise. I am a loud farter, but there is no smell. I do not think it [the letter] is unreasonable, you get ladies in there," – Maurice Fox, required to leave the Kirkham Street Sports and Social Club in Devon, England, when he needs to pass gas.

"In the absence of some startling new evidence, the crux of the issue turns out to be this: Do you believe the legacy of American racism, in all its complexity, can explain depressed black IQ scores, even when controlling for all other factors, including socioeconomic status? Is the black experience, in other words, so unique as to constitute, for nearly all black Americans, a separate wheat field? If you say yes, then good news: You believe (along with the most prominent environmentalists) that the black-white IQ gap will close in the next 50 or so years. If you think no, then bad news: You believe, with the most prominent hereditarians, that blacks as a group must resign themselves to higher rates of poverty, unemployment, divorce, and violent criminality purely as a matter of genetic fate," – Stephen Metcalfe, Slate.

"If Senator Biden is implying that sociology students at Bryn Mawr College are very attractive and more liberal than he is, I wouldn’t spend any time trying to disabuse him of that notion," – David Karen, sociology chair at Bryn Mawr, responding to a very inside joke by the senator from Delaware.